Posts from Life in the Kitchen

Years ago, coupons played a significant role in my money-saving strategies. However, once we paid off our all-consuming debt, I decided to ditch the processed foods and work more to improve our family's diet. That meant that coupons were no longer a great fit for me. (While there are health-food coupons, the practice of clipping every coupon that came down the pike was no longer the best one for me, either for time or nutrition.)

Instead I turned to a number of cookbooks that help me save money and feed my family well. These are some of my favorite resources — books that are fun to read as well practical for helping us eat well and stay in the black.

What keeps you interested in cooking and trying new things? We started a discussion about that this week and I loved reading so many of your ideas and experiences. One stuck out — a reader named eilonwy took on a major (and fun!) project to keep herself learning new things.

Wondering what to do about those long, fibrous stalks once you’ve used the bulb of fennel? It’s a shame that more recipes don’t incorporate them into the same dish you’re making with the bulb. But alas, if that’s your fate, then don’t “discard,” but hang onto those fennel stalks. They’re handy in many ways, especially if you’re fond of making soups or just stock.

I recently made a very small change to the food cabinet next to my stove that immediately made it neater. It's such a simple thing that I'm a little embarrassed I didn't pick up the habit earlier, but now that I've implemented the change, I'm totally set on this new way of doing things. Here's what I did.

Establishing a drawer just for food storage had me smitten with this deep drawer space when I first organized my home's kitchen. Now, it's become quite the jigsaw puzzle of containers. Finding a lid in one try happens occasionally, but getting the drawer to actually close takes a Tetris high-score skill level of container stacking.

Lots of things have found a new home during my kitchen organization project, but unfortunately, food storage containers are here to stay in this exact spot. I had no idea where to start, so I did just that — started.

For quite a while, I was a huge fan of grocery list apps — they save paper, make it easy to add items as soon as you remember them, and are simple to share with other household members. But at a certain point I realized one unavoidable fact: I hate fiddling with and staring at my phone while I shop.

So I gave up my high-tech habits and returned to the low-fi, totally nerdy grocery list template I created during my pre-smartphone days. And you know what? It's awesome.

Nowadays most of us collect recipes from many sources — family members, friends, cookbooks, food magazines, blogs, and websites — which makes finding a good recipe organization system more important than ever!

So, we want to know: how do you organize your recipes? What programs or tools (online and otherwise) do you rely on? What's your system?

We all know the axiom for sane, rational grocery shopping: Don't go to the store when you're hungry. Research supports this sage and ancient advice: this study found that people bought more high-calorie food when grocery-shopping hungry.

However! That's the ideal. Life often works out otherwise. How often have you hit the grocery store for a dinner run, ravenous after a long day, and come out dazed and clutching two extra bags of cookies and fixings for nachos? Uh-huh. Us too. So let's talk strategy — hangry strategy.